Our Ark (2021)
Our Ark wins Best Short Doc at Istanbul International Film Festival
Our Ark Screenings:
IDFA (International Documentary Festival Amsterdam), Netherlands
True/False, Missouri, USA
Rooftop Films, NYC USA
First Look, MoMI, NYC, USA
Glasgow Short Film Festival, UK
Istanbul International Film Festival, Turkey (Best Short Documentary Award)
Vilnius Film Festival Kino Pavasaris, Lithuania
Imagine Science Film Festival, NYC, USA
BAFICI, Argentina
Environmental Film Festival, DC, USA
Hot Docs, Toronto, Canada
Film Olomouc, Czech Republic
FICMEC, Spain
Taiwan International Documentary Festival,
Seoul International Ecological Festival, South Korea
Documetarist, Istanbul, Turkey
Aegean Film Festival, Greece
Guanajuato International Film Festival, Mexico
Crested Butte Film Festival, Colorado, USA
Press:
ARTFORUM: True Blood, Nicholas Rapold on the True/False Film Festival ‘an apocalyptic dispatch on the simulacrum that gives “digital first” an ominous new ring’
FILMMAKER MAGAZINE: Highlights of MoMI’s First Look 2022
ARK (2020) is a two-channel video on the development of virtual reality against the ongoing collapse of the environment. It explores the nascent 3D archive of objects and how virtual reality technology stands in for and distracts from loss and absence in the physical world.
Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1940 novella Invention of Morel, features a device that can perfectly capture life—at a cost. Anything captured by the device is infinitely replayed as a hologram but destroyed in the real world. In another approach to simulation, Elon Musk has said: “The odds that we are in base reality is one in billions”. He refers to an idea popular amongst technologists and entrepreneurs: the simulation hypothesis, which argues that we live in an artificial simulation rather than in reality. Enthusiasm for this hypothesis may be explained by the nihilism of our current trajectory. This belief offers solace against paralysis: as we bring our world to ecological catastrophe, we terminate only one of infinite “simulations”.
First commissioned by Protocinema, for ‘How shall we dress for the occasion?’ at 601artspace, curated by Ulya Soley, with Chulayarnnon Siriphol and Pınar Yoldas, supported by SAHA + 601artspace
January 11 - March 22, 2020
PRESS: Artforum Review: How Shall We Dress For The Occasion “The most arresting piece here, Kathryn Hamilton and Deniz Tortum’s two-channel video ARK, 2020, proposes that we have not abandoned the future, but have shifted our hopes for it to the digital sphere. ARK opens with two seemingly unrelated facts, relayed to us via voice-over: The first virtual reality headset was invented in 1968, the same year the Guam flying fox—a breed of fruit bat—died out. In the remainder of the video, the narrator works to knit the two events together, arguing that the rise of simulation technology has hastened the decline of the physical world. It is not a coincidence that the development of VR occurred alongside deforestation, the melting of polar ice, and mass species extinctions. Rather, we embrace these inventions precisely because they provide us with a convenient escape from our decaying home, opening a portal to an immaculate universe filled with any number of unspoiled earths. There is little need to fixate on the demise of our planet if we can generate and inhabit a better one in a dream realm”